Wavels
Well-Known Member
Here is an interesting story about the many attempts to make a movie based on novel Atlas Shrugged
BACK in the 1970s Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather, first approached Ayn Rand to make a movie of her novel Atlas Shrugged. But Rand, who had fled the Soviet Union and gone on to inspire capitalists and egoists everywhere, worried aloud, apparently in all seriousness, that the Soviets might try to take over Paramount to block the project.
I told her, The Russians arent that desperate to wreck your book, Mr. Ruddy recalled in a recent interview.
Rands paranoia, as Mr. Ruddy remembers it, seems laughable. But perhaps it was merely misplaced. For so many people have tried and failed to turn the book she considered her masterpiece into a movie that it could easily strike a suspicious person as evidence of a nefarious collectivist conspiracy. Or at least of Hollywoods mediocrity.
Of course Rand herself had a hand in blocking some of those attempts before she died in 1982. Her heirs in the Objectivist school of thought helped sink some others. And plans for at least a couple of television mini-series fell to the vicissitudes of network politics and media mergers.
But Rands grand polemical novel keeps selling, and her admirers in Hollywood keep trying, and the latest effort involves a lineup of heavy hitters, starting with Angelina Jolie. Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart and We Were Soldiers, is working on compressing the nearly 1,200-page book into a conventional two-hour screenplay. Howard and Karen Baldwin, the husband-and-wife producers of Ray, are overseeing the project, and Lions Gate Entertainment is footing the bill.
Whether Ms. Jolie, who has called herself something of a Rand fan, will bring the novels heroine, Dagny Taggart, to life on screen, or merely wind up on a list with other actresses who sought or were sought for the role including Barbara Stanwyck, Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett and Sharon Stone remains to be seen. Until now, at least, no one in Hollywood has figured out a formula that promises both to sell popcorn and to do justice to the original text, let alone to the philosophy that it hammers home endlessly, at times in lengthy speeches. (The final one is 60 pages long.)
But Mr. Baldwin said he believed that Mr. Wallace and the rest of their team were up to the task. We all believe in the book, and will be true to the book, he said.
Easier said than done. Published in 1957 and set in the near future, Atlas Shrugged plots the collapse of American society after thinkers, industrialists, scientists, artists and other innovators Rands kind of people go on strike and disappear, refusing to contribute to a collectivist world. Dagny, a railroad heiress, tries to save the country from starvation and total collapse, while falling in love with the mysterious John Galt, who she later learns was the man who started the strike. The novel ends after an apocalypse.
During Rands lifetime, her Objectivism, which celebrates rational self-interest and capitalism, was widely dismissed by academia and disparaged by both the political right and left. The reviews for Atlas Shrugged were not much kinder. It howls in the readers ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention, Granville Hicks wrote in The New York Times, and then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.
Yet Atlas was a best seller. Six million copies have been sold over the years, and it remains a popular title, particularly among college students, according to Penguin Group, its publisher. Many of those copies wind up on shelves on Wall Street, where the book has been affectionately referred to as the Bible of selfishness.
Hollywood took notice of the novels popularity from the start, but Rand refused to consider movie offers: she had been burned, she felt, by the experience of turning her earlier (and, at 720 pages, comparatively short) novel, The Fountainhead, into the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.
Rand had adapted it herself, but she battled with the director, King Vidor, over changes to her screenplay. In the end a single line was cut from a six-minute speech by Coopers character, Howard Roark, reportedly leaving Rand embittered by the experience. She vowed that Warner Brothers would not be permitted to adapt Atlas unless the studio recut The Fountainhead, returning the edited line to its rightful place, said her biographer Jeff Britting.
In 1972, 15 years after the novels publication, Mr. Ruddy, fresh from producing The Godfather, decided to make a run at Rand, who was already in her late 60s. Atlas Shrugged, lets face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film, he said.
Rands agents warned him to expect rejection, he said, but reluctantly set up an appointment. He recalled meeting her in a room with one small love seat and many empty chairs. Mr. Ruddy, 6-foot-4, squeezed in next to the petite aging writer on the small couch and commenced to woo her.
I knew from Atlas Shrugged that she dug men, that she was a lusty woman, he recalled in a telephone interview. We start talking. Its instant love. Before long, he said, Rand was telling him, in her heavy accent, I want you to do Atlas Shrugged.
BACK in the 1970s Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather, first approached Ayn Rand to make a movie of her novel Atlas Shrugged. But Rand, who had fled the Soviet Union and gone on to inspire capitalists and egoists everywhere, worried aloud, apparently in all seriousness, that the Soviets might try to take over Paramount to block the project.
I told her, The Russians arent that desperate to wreck your book, Mr. Ruddy recalled in a recent interview.
Rands paranoia, as Mr. Ruddy remembers it, seems laughable. But perhaps it was merely misplaced. For so many people have tried and failed to turn the book she considered her masterpiece into a movie that it could easily strike a suspicious person as evidence of a nefarious collectivist conspiracy. Or at least of Hollywoods mediocrity.
Of course Rand herself had a hand in blocking some of those attempts before she died in 1982. Her heirs in the Objectivist school of thought helped sink some others. And plans for at least a couple of television mini-series fell to the vicissitudes of network politics and media mergers.
But Rands grand polemical novel keeps selling, and her admirers in Hollywood keep trying, and the latest effort involves a lineup of heavy hitters, starting with Angelina Jolie. Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart and We Were Soldiers, is working on compressing the nearly 1,200-page book into a conventional two-hour screenplay. Howard and Karen Baldwin, the husband-and-wife producers of Ray, are overseeing the project, and Lions Gate Entertainment is footing the bill.
Whether Ms. Jolie, who has called herself something of a Rand fan, will bring the novels heroine, Dagny Taggart, to life on screen, or merely wind up on a list with other actresses who sought or were sought for the role including Barbara Stanwyck, Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett and Sharon Stone remains to be seen. Until now, at least, no one in Hollywood has figured out a formula that promises both to sell popcorn and to do justice to the original text, let alone to the philosophy that it hammers home endlessly, at times in lengthy speeches. (The final one is 60 pages long.)
But Mr. Baldwin said he believed that Mr. Wallace and the rest of their team were up to the task. We all believe in the book, and will be true to the book, he said.
Easier said than done. Published in 1957 and set in the near future, Atlas Shrugged plots the collapse of American society after thinkers, industrialists, scientists, artists and other innovators Rands kind of people go on strike and disappear, refusing to contribute to a collectivist world. Dagny, a railroad heiress, tries to save the country from starvation and total collapse, while falling in love with the mysterious John Galt, who she later learns was the man who started the strike. The novel ends after an apocalypse.
During Rands lifetime, her Objectivism, which celebrates rational self-interest and capitalism, was widely dismissed by academia and disparaged by both the political right and left. The reviews for Atlas Shrugged were not much kinder. It howls in the readers ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention, Granville Hicks wrote in The New York Times, and then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.
Yet Atlas was a best seller. Six million copies have been sold over the years, and it remains a popular title, particularly among college students, according to Penguin Group, its publisher. Many of those copies wind up on shelves on Wall Street, where the book has been affectionately referred to as the Bible of selfishness.
Hollywood took notice of the novels popularity from the start, but Rand refused to consider movie offers: she had been burned, she felt, by the experience of turning her earlier (and, at 720 pages, comparatively short) novel, The Fountainhead, into the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.
Rand had adapted it herself, but she battled with the director, King Vidor, over changes to her screenplay. In the end a single line was cut from a six-minute speech by Coopers character, Howard Roark, reportedly leaving Rand embittered by the experience. She vowed that Warner Brothers would not be permitted to adapt Atlas unless the studio recut The Fountainhead, returning the edited line to its rightful place, said her biographer Jeff Britting.
In 1972, 15 years after the novels publication, Mr. Ruddy, fresh from producing The Godfather, decided to make a run at Rand, who was already in her late 60s. Atlas Shrugged, lets face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film, he said.
Rands agents warned him to expect rejection, he said, but reluctantly set up an appointment. He recalled meeting her in a room with one small love seat and many empty chairs. Mr. Ruddy, 6-foot-4, squeezed in next to the petite aging writer on the small couch and commenced to woo her.
I knew from Atlas Shrugged that she dug men, that she was a lusty woman, he recalled in a telephone interview. We start talking. Its instant love. Before long, he said, Rand was telling him, in her heavy accent, I want you to do Atlas Shrugged.
